Ten Poems for Difficult Times
I had spent some time with Jack Gilbert’s poem “A Brief for the Defense” and then encountered it again as one of the ten poems Roger Housden includes in his new book Ten Poems for Difficult Times (New World Library, 2018).
I’m always grateful to read Roger Housden’s books in the Ten Poems series for the poems he chooses on a theme and the essays he writes about them. The poems he has chosen for “difficult times” also include “It’s This Way” by Nazim Hikmet, “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith and “The Thing Is” by Ellen Bass . The poems aren’t to give us information Roger says, “but a visceral experience of an existential and timeless truth.”
The lines that puzzle and provoke me in the Gilbert poem are:
There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. . . . .
I wrote a poem I call “On Reading ‘A Brief for the Defense’ by Jack Gilbert:
We stand on the bridge, look out to freighters
in the harbour, the ferry headed for Departure Bay,
coastal mountains coated in snow. A small tugboat
pulls a fishing boat. Three cormorants and an oyster catcher
perch, attentive, on the rocks. Sarah at my side, a raven lets itself
fall from the sky for just a second, risking delight.
Sarah and I were also “risking delight” during times of great sorrow around us. As Roger Housden points out in his essay accompanying the Gilbert poem, all the suffering and sorrow is not our fault, “but it is our responsibility, because we, too, are human. Gilbert’s response to the question of […]